Technomancer (25 page)

“Remember when I told you about how it happened? About how Robert vanished? I left out some things. I changed some details.”

“Why?”

“Because the details made it sound more like Robert was leaving me. And I didn’t want it to sound that way. I knew
if it did, the police would ignore the case. Once I had the story in my mind I stuck to it, even with you. I didn’t think it would matter. I didn’t think the details would stop you from finding him.”

“So, he didn’t get sucked into a rift?”

“Well, he did go into it and vanish,” she said, “but he wasn’t sucked up by it. He stepped into the shimmering, burning air, talking to me about how cool it looked. He didn’t seem scared at all.”

“And the shoe?”

Jenna looked a little embarrassed. “I ripped it off his foot. I thought maybe it was pulling him in, somehow mesmerizing him. He wasn’t acting like himself. So I went after him and grabbed his left foot. His shoe came off…he yanked it away from me.”

I nodded, rubbing my temples.
What a bastard.
It was one thing to take off on her—but for Townsend to not even call and let her know he was still alive? I was convinced now that Robert Townsend, or Houdini, or whoever he was, still breathed somewhere. He had quite a sense of humor, our friend Robert. I intended to discuss it with him when I got the chance.

“He seemed possessed. I thought I was helping.”

I wanted to apologize for my sex, but I figured it was bad timing. I didn’t need to associate myself with this cad in her mind.

“Love requires trust, Jenna,” I said. “Don’t let this man ruin your life.”

“As of right now, he’s done just that,” she said.

I looked at her, hearing a new tone in her voice. She was angry now. I saw a look on her face that reminded me of the Jenna I’d first met down in the casino. I recalled she was willing to do anything to get vengeance then. Now, I
supposed she was doubly dangerous. If I were Robert, I wouldn’t come near her again. It occurred to me that perhaps he knew about her smoldering temper. Maybe that’s why he’d bailed out on her in such a cowardly fashion. I also wondered what else she might have lied about.

I had a sudden thought. “What about the ring?” I asked. “Do you still have it?”

“Yeah,” she said, lifting it up.

I stared at her. “If he was such a bastard, why would he leave you his ring?” I asked.

As I watched, she held up her hand and removed the ring. She reached out her hand toward me. “You should take it. I don’t want it now.”

I had to admit, I was sorely tempted. I reached out my hand, my eyes widening, delighted with the power they saw in her fine palm. But I controlled myself. I reflected that these unique objects
did
fill a person with greed, just as Gilling had said.

Instead of taking her ring, I closed her fingers over it. My hand gently encompassed her smaller fist. “If he did leave it by accident,” I said, “then he’s out there somewhere, kicking himself. What better way to get back at him? You have the one thing he truly loves.”

Jenna brightened a fraction. Her tears had stopped now, and she looked at me thoughtfully. “You’re right,” she said. “I’ll keep it.”

I leaned back and smiled. Inwardly, some darker part of my mind complained I was an idiot. Why didn’t I just hand her my sunglasses as well, along with every dime in my pocket as a tip? I told myself to shut up. Sure, I could use some luck. But the ring hadn’t brought Jenna luck in love, and that was what she really cared about. Winning at cards wasn’t all there was to life.

At some point while we were talking, I put my hands into my pockets. I frowned, finding something hard in there. Something unexpected. I jerked my hand out in alarm when I realized what it was.

“What’s wrong?” Jenna asked.

I clenched my teeth and looked pained. How did you tell a woman you had a dead man’s finger in your pocket? And indeed, that’s just what I’d found. I had kept the Gray Man’s finger in there since I’d walked out on the cultists and had my little talk with Gilling. It felt odd to the touch—like a pen in my pocket. Only this pen flexed when I walked around, now that I was thinking about it, I could feel the joints move. I felt a little sick, and couldn’t hide the fact from Jenna.

“I’ve had a hard night,” I said, standing up. “Can I use your bathroom?”

“Of course,” she said. “The eggs Benedict probably didn’t help.”

I nodded, wishing she was right. I went into the bathroom, which was more or less equivalent to a million other hotel bathrooms. I pushed the door shut with my foot and looked at myself in the mirror. I could see the outline of the finger in my pocket.

“Do you have any tissues out there in the room? I don’t see—” I began, but then I found the box. It was hidden under the bathroom counter. I pulled out a tissue—then ripped out a half dozen more. I wadded them up and reached into my pocket, using them like a glove. I could barely feel the shape of it, and that was just fine with me.

I had worked it halfway out of my pocket when a pretty nose poked into the restroom with me. She had a tissue in her hand. I realized I hadn’t locked the door.

“Are you OK?” Jenna asked.

I jumped. It was a natural reaction. I must have felt guilty at some level. The finger, which I was wrapping in a fresh layer of paper, sprang seemingly of its own accord onto the bathroom counter. The counter was polished to look like a granite slab. The finger stood out as a pale curled object, unmistakably alien on the slate-gray surface.

The finger thumped down, and Jenna craned her neck to look at it. I thought about pushing her out, but it was already too late.

“What is that—” she began, then she cut off in a strangled scream. She disappeared and I walked after her.

“Sorry you had to see that,” I told her.

“What’s wrong with you?” she demanded. She sat on the bed now, beside the phone. She had put one hand on the receiver, but she hadn’t picked it up and dialed the police yet. Instead, she’d grabbed a pillow with her other hand and hugged it to her chest.

“I never told you about what McKesson and I found,” I said, “about the Gray Men.”

“What Gray Men? Are you some kind of weirdo? I really can pick them. Mom always said that, you know. She said if there were six football players and a freak in a line, I would choose the lucky number seven every time.”

I ran my fingers through my hair. I wasn’t quite sure how to talk her through this one. In the end, I decided just to dive into it. I told her about McKesson, about the Gray Men in their city of cubes, and about shooting them as they came through into our world. I urged her to remember she’d seen her husband step away into an impossible rip in space. Before I was finished, she was staring at me in disbelief.

“That’s how my story must have sounded to the cops,” she said. “No wonder they looked at me the way they did.”

After I’d talked Jenna into a relative state of calm, she finally came to believe what I was saying—with reservations. At least she’d taken her hand away from the phone. She still had a death grip on her pillow. After a few minutes more, during which I explained how I’d come into possession of this unusual trophy, she was willing to look at the finger again. I noticed, however, that when she followed me toward the bathroom, she didn’t follow closely.

What finally convinced her I was telling the truth wasn’t the grayish color of the finger’s skin. That seemed normal enough, given that it had been dead for some time. What did it was the pearl-colored spur on the knuckle. Once examined closely, it seemed distinctly inhuman.

“So, you killed some kind of mutant?” she asked, leaning around the corner of the doorway.

“I don’t think so. In his world, he was perfectly normal. There were quite a number of these Gray Men in evidence.”

“How did you walk around all day with that in your pocket and not think about it?” she demanded.

I thought of alcohol, of Holly, and the resulting long night of distractions. But I decided to leave Holly out of my explanation.

“I had a few drinks,” I said. “And I was overwhelmed with other things, such as surviving.”

Jenna was willing to accept that. She peeked at the finger with big eyes. “What are we going to do with it?” she asked, her voice hushed.

I wasn’t so impressed by it now. I had originally thought I could use it to get McKesson’s attention. Maybe I could threaten to take it to medical people and blow this whole thing into a big news story. After all, he’d said it was his job to cover up details like this. But I realized now that the newspeople weren’t going to be terribly interested. Unsubstantiated sightings of aliens, bigfoot, and the like went on every day. They always turned out to be hoaxes. That indicated to me that they were either being covered up, or they really were hoaxes. In either case, no one was going to take me seriously. Still, I didn’t want to give up on a piece of real evidence. I supposed that part of my personality wanted to investigate the darkest of secrets.

“Have you got something to keep it in?” I asked Jenna.

She looked at me and winced. “Do we
have
to keep it? Won’t it start to rot or something?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but I’m not dropping it in the hotel room trash.”

“Maybe you could sneak into a room across the hall and dump it there.”

“How rude,” I said, laughing. “But seriously, do you have something?”

In the end, she produced a small plastic bottle filled with shampoo. “Here,” she said. “But I’m not touching it.”

I dumped the shampoo into the sink. I washed out the bottle and dried it with the hotel hair dryer. Then I used a plastic key card to scoot and nudge the finger into the bottle and screwed on the cap. I could see it through the orange plastic. I shook it, and the spur rattled.

“That is the most disgusting thing ever,” Jenna said.

“You should never enroll in medical school.”

“Don’t worry.”

I frowned at the finger in the bottle. It did look exactly like it had when I’d found it. There had been no discoloration. Even the bloody end, where it had been severed, looked…fresh.

Still frowning, I unscrewed the bottle again.

“What are you doing?” Jenna asked.

I tipped it upside down over the counter. The finger didn’t fall out right away; I had to shake it. The spur on the back of the knuckle had gotten caught on the opening.

“I am not going to watch this,” she said, leaving.

I finally managed to shake it out upon the countertop. I used the plastic key card again, scooting it around so the severed end faced me. I saw the flesh was red and looked like raw meat. Yes, it was disgusting, but it was also bizarre. Why hadn’t the blood dried up? Why did it still look wet and freshly severed? I tapped at it again and examined it, my face inches from the countertop.

Jenna had returned to the doorway. “You have to tell me why you are playing with that thing, or you have to leave.”

I glanced at her. “It’s strange,” I said. “But don’t you think it should have dried up by now? I mean, it looks like it was just cut off. So disgusting.”

“You said it was from some alien. Maybe their blood stays wet longer.”

I thought about what McKesson had said about these other places—that in other worlds the rules were sometimes different. I wondered if that could be the case here. It didn’t sound right, however. This was our world. Wouldn’t this finger have to play by our physical laws? Evaporation dried things, turning liquids into solids.

I picked up the bottle and looked inside. There was no trace of the blood that I could see. I turned my pocket inside out next. There were no stains there. Not the slightest trace of blood.

“I think we really have something here,” I said. “Do you have a lighter?”

“I don’t smoke.”

I picked up the wad of tissues I’d used to take the finger from my pocket. I carefully leafed through them. There was no blood on any of them.

“Have you got a knife?” I asked.

Jenna stared at me. “You’ve got to be kidding. Don’t you think it’s dead already?”

“Anything will do. A nail file?”

Sighing, she left and rummaged in her makeup kit. She came back and handed me a pair of nail clippers. “I don’t want them back when you’re done,” she said, and left the bathroom.

I couldn’t cut the nail—or the flesh. I tried the tip of the pearly spur—it was like steel. I tried the delicate strips of torn skin next, but couldn’t dent them. It was as if the finger was made of soft, flexible titanium. I couldn’t mark any part of it. And yet, it had been cut free of a Gray Man recently. Therefore, it must have undergone some kind of change to its nature.

Finally, the clippers broke in my hand. I tried soaking the finger in the sink, then toweling it off. There were no changes in its appearance. I left the finger on the counter and walked back into the room.

“Well?” Jenna asked. “Are you going to tell me why you’ve turned into a ghoul?”

“I think it’s an object,” I said, frowning.

She looked at me, shaking her head in confusion.

“Like your ring or my sunglasses. I can’t change or damage it. Even though it’s a piece of dead flesh, it won’t rot, and the blood in it won’t exit. The skin can’t be cut.”